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eStarling Touch Connect Digital Frame

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What's hot: Connectivity lets fresh content in daily. Large and bright screen.

What's not: Touch screen slightly reduces color saturation.

Reviewed January, 2010 by Tong Zhang, Senior Editor

With a flood of digital photo frames on the market, the eStarling WPF-588 stands out as a connected photo and video frame that can get its content right over the Internet and keep it fresh. The digital frame comes with built-in Wi-Fi as well as an Ethernet port, and it has applications for email, RSS and clients for photos sites and social networking sites. The advantage is you get to see new photos every day instead of the same old pictures on your storage card (you can certainly do that too). If you have family and friends who are traveling and wish to share their photos and videos in real time, you can download them directly via Gmail to store in the frame’s 2GB internal memory. It can display photos, text and videos in common formats including MPEG2, MPEG4, H.263, H.264, MOV and WMV.

Design

The eStarling WPF-588 digital frame has a 10.2” display that has 800 x 480 resolution. The display is quite bright and has brightness settings. The bezel is about 1.3 inches which frames the picture screen well yet doesn't take up too much more space on your desk. All controls and ports live on the back of the frame including an SD card slot, an Ethernet port, a DC input and the power button. The eStarling frame has both a stand slot and a wall mount on the back and the AC adapter’s cord is long enough to hang the frame on a wall near an outlet.

The SD card slot, Ethernet jack and power jack on the back.

The display has a finger-friendly touch interface. After the initial wireless set up, the Media Taskbar on the bottom of the touch screen lets you set up and control photo and video playback. For photos you can set the layout and interval of the slide show. There are two types of photo layouts, one is just a photo slideshow and the other includes a sidebar. Since the display is quite large you can put a clock with date, Yahoo Weather and a slideshow preview on either side of the center photo display. For video playback you can set the volume, capture a frame to use as the thumbnail preview and use the play/pause/forward/back buttons to control the video playback. The audio is good for a picture frame and the volume is loud.

The eStarling offers two modes of content input: SD Mode and Internet Mode. When you insert an SD card the picture frame will switch to the SD Mode automatically and start to display the photos and videos from the SD card. The SD slot supports SDHC; we tested a 16 gig SD card and it worked fine with the eStarling. Using the SD card is simple and painless, but what sets the eStarling WPF-588 apart from other frames is the Internet connectivity and the built-in tools for Wi-Fi 802.11n connections, links to popular social network sites, reading RSS feeds and even checking the weather.

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To set up the Wi-Fi connection, the eStarling offers automatic searching and a virtual keyboard for entering connection info. You must use a Gmail account to take full advantage of the frame’s Internet features such as RSS feeds and sending it photos via email (the manufacturer suggests you create a new gmail account for use with the picture frame). You can view your Google Calendar using your regular gmail account rather than the one you created for the photo frame. The eStarling WPF-588 comes with 7 apps: Photos & Video via Gmail, My RSS, Picasa, Flickr, Facebook, Google Calendar and Twitter. The wireless connection also allows the frame maker to push over the air firmware updates and upgrades.

With the latest firmware, the picture frame is adequately fast when using applications and running slideshows. There are just a few settings, and these include time and date for the clock, auto on/off times, weather location, brightness and a reset option. Oddly, if you set the system clock to use 12 hour time, most other apps still use 24 hour time. This means your Google Calendar appointments will show up in 24 hour time (e.g.: meeting at 15:00 hours). Hopefully further firmware updates will fix these minor issues.

In the Box

The eStarling TouchConnect comes in a very nicely packed gift box style package that includes simply the frame, a stand and the AC adapter.

Conclusion

Even if you’re into photography, it can be a hassle to frequently load new pictures so that you don’t look at the same set of photos for too long. The eStarling WPF-588 with Wi-Fi connection can fight that stagnation by accessing popular photos sites to get fresh photos and videos daily. It’s also a great gift idea for parents and grandparents who want to see the latest photos of the kids but lack the tech savvy to load them up. Just set up the frame with your online photo-sharing account, and they’ll get the latest and greatest family photos. Once the media syncing is set up, the frame downloads photos and videos in the background and rotates the new content automatically. Though it doesn’t have a very high resolution, the screen is bright and it’s sharp by touch screen standards. Color saturation isn’t as high as the better non-touch photo frames from Sony, but the eStarling is among the best touch screen frames. We love the sidebar mode with weather, clock and photo preview.

Pro: Connectivity lets fresh content in daily. Large and bright screen.

Con: Takes some time to authenticate on all the sites.

Price: $199.99

Web site: www.estarling.com